How Do You Define Your Project and Team Goals?
Let's learn how to define your project and team goals.
We'll cover the following
Defining your team’s and your project’s goals efficiently is crucial for success. As a manager, you need to ensure you involve your team in this process and figure out the best route together. The overall business goals of the company need to be analyzed so that they can be translated into your team’s goals. For the effective growth of the team, you need to maintain a balance between either being overambitious and taking on more than your team can handle, or taking on too little.
What the interviewer is looking for#
- How you take business goals and translate them into a team roadmap.
- How you make sure your team is involved.
- How you make sure the tech backlog is addressed.
- How you make sure to do your homework from past projects to minimize the number of hidden issues that can pop up and slow down your team.
- How you make sure individual goals are aligned with company goals.
What a good answer looks like#
“Our team works on a three-month planning cycle. We make sure to do a team exercise at the start of each cycle, where we sit down and list all the things we need to tackle. A proportion of those things are requested from other teams on things they want us to deliver as dependencies. We figure out what our nonnegotiables are. The other things are more in line with the company goals, such as building a new coding pipeline. As a business, what are the things that our team needs to deliver? How are we maintaining and improving the reliability of our services?
An important component of all this is innovation. I make sure my team is very involved in setting the goals, and we always set aside a portion of the team’s bandwidth toward innovating, even at an industry level. In figuring out all of this, you sometimes realize you need to hire more people or get work done through other teams. It’s tricky to make estimations in software engineering in general, but we try to take rough estimates to the higher side and then sign up for goals that would require 40% of the team’s bandwidth. That leaves 60% of our bandwidth free for urgent things that might come up or for situations when we might have to stay on call. We try to make sure the whole team’s priorities are lined toward these times. Therefore, if all engineers deliver on their own goals, then the team’s goals are achieved.”
Red flags in your answer#
Some of the things that shouldn’t go in a good answer include:
- Taking on too much responsibility, which results in unhappy engineers being forced to work long hours.
- Waiting for top management to tell you what to do instead of taking ownership of the process.
- Not aligning the team on the priorities.
Give an Example of When You Had to Handle Conflict Within the Team
Have You Ever Missed Project Goals?